


Honey on my Tongue

by orphan_account



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Smoking, husbands who have been divorced 7 times, idk guys they're not nice to each other and they smoke, no beta we die like men, spoilers to mag160
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:53:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Magnus’s also got a pipe, one of those thick ones. It makes absolute sense that Jonah Magnus would smoke a pipe, and Peter tilts his head as he tries to imagine the stupid thing in Elias’ mouth… thin black stem between his lips, the polished briar bowl glancing with light…
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 11
Kudos: 103





	Honey on my Tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [steviekat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steviekat/gifts).



> I have absolutely never smoked before, nor have i vaped, so, you know. pinch of salt. don't vape. don't smoke. do drugs responsibly.

There is a painting above Elias Bouchard’s desk. Peter spends a long time looking at it, mostly because Elias always _knows_ when Peter will be there, so will take a coffee break lasting anywhere between 3 hours and 3 days in an attempt to draw out their — what Elias likes to call ‘spousal feud’ and Peter prefers to refer to as ‘foreplay’. 

It’s certainly a nice painting, very run of the mill; Jonah Magnus circa 1816, in that indeterminate point of life between 30 and 50. He’s got a silly wig on and his bright white cravat stands out against his black outfit. Peter likes how the face is soft and almost out of focus, but the cravat is crisp and precise: the thin material painted to show how skilled the painter was at lace, or whatever it was the stupid thing was made of. 

It kind of looks like Jonah’s got a tissue around his neck, or maybe a piece of cling film wrapped tight, which is certainly an appealing thought.

Magnus’s also got a pipe, one of those thick ones. It makes absolute sense that Jonah Magnus would smoke a pipe, and Peter tilts his head as he tries to imagine the stupid thing in Elias’ mouth… thin black stem between his lips, the polished briar bowl glancing with light… 

He scratches at his beard. Peter had brought a pipe back from one of his Tundra trips, a chunky fucker carved into the shape of a mermaid. It’s an unrepentantly ugly piece of work: a white ivory woman with huge tits erupting from the body of a salmon, the alabaster stem jutting out of her back like it’s been jammed up her nether regions. 

Peter had thought it very funny. Elias had not, and it was cited on their third divorce papers as the cause of their fractured marriage. Peter glances over at the framed document, smiling at the memory of Elias’s lawyer showing up on his doorstep, demanding to photograph the pipe. He’d been a disposable one, Peter knew, because he’d been dressed shoddily and reeked of terror. The next lawyer Elias had sent was cleaner, yet to feel the eyes on the back of his neck, so Peter let him wander around the house for a few hours before ‘finding it’ in his coat pocket. 

For a while, Elias had had a slim cigarette holder, had perfected the _leans-back, eyebrow-arched, flicks-cigarette_ movement, ash landing neatly in the ashtray Peter had bought him way back some time in their first marriage. Peter can’t quite remember the last time he saw Elias smoking the thing, and a glance around the room confirms the ashtray is no longer within easy reach. 

He doubted Elias cared much about the illegality, but he couldn’t quite work out whether he’d seen the stupid pipe since 2006. Peter hummed to himself, remembering how long the holder had made Elias’s fingers look, the man leaning out of the window to puff breaths of cloudy air out into the evening sky, the remnants of sunset casting the smoke in a pink-orange hue.

Peter could almost smell the bitterness of it, the harsh smoke mixing with the central London air, cut through with Elias’s cologne; cracked pepper and bergamot. Close and suffocating, the dead ash in the air, the tar, the cloying perfume… it was one of Peter’s fondest memories. 

Elias rarely went back through a phase, and certainly not if Peter suggested it, so he doubted he’d ever be graced with the cigarette holder again, but he was sure he could find an alternate. He hummed to himself as he rooted through Elias’s desk, clicking open the many secret compartments he’d found over the years. Elias was very aware that Peter had unlocked all but one of the compartments, had never kept anything truly sensitive there, but Peter liked to have something to do with his hands while he thought. 

It was a race, really. How quickly Peter could unlock the drawer, against how quickly Elias could make his way back from wherever he’d vanished to. It was a way for Peter to force conversation, a game, a chess match and a puzzle grafted in one.

He’d once come very close by making sure he’d had a 2 day head start on Elias, so this was not a serious attempt, mind still settled on the painting of Jonah. The red, almost velvet-like curtain in the background, dappled in some sort of sunlight, _click._

Peter looked down at his hands, almost in shock as he pulled out the compartment. He’d — he wasn’t sure how he’d done it, but the piece had come away in his hands like they’d been greased. He sat back, feeling almost cheated of a challenge, carefully putting the small drawer on Elias’s desk. 

He slid off the lid of the compartment carefully, sleeve over his face to protect himself from any immediate toxin Elias might have deemed it fun to sprinkle over this final prize. 

There was a small velvet box inside, the outside covered in a velvet a similar shade to the curtains in the portrait. Peter gave the box a tentative prod, checking for something that bite his finger. On giving it 30 seconds to activate and finding it remain a box, he slowly opened it. 

Peter looked up at the portrait, then down. With careful fingers he picked the pipe up and held it to the light of the window. The exact pipe from the painting, the gleam of the bronze-coloured wood _beautiful_ in the dying light of the sun. He spun the pipe between his fingers, hefted it in the palm of his hand, brushed the lip of the stem against his own, reveling in the cold of the horn glancing against his skin. 

The pipe was clean, no leftover tobacco in the bowl, no fading scent of smoke. A small engravement branded the pipe and Peter rubbed his finger against the name, letting his thumb dip into the delicate grooves of text. There were not scratches or bite marks in the pipe, but even so Peter knew this was the one Elias — Jonah had smoked. Could feel it. He put the pipe between his lips and made a few sucks, liking the heft of it in his mouth. 

Well, then. He sat at Elias’s desk, kicking his feet up on whatever unimportant work Elias had left about, opening a tab on his phone. He doesn’t use it much, only really has google maps and chrome installed for when he needs directions to the nearest not-busy-place, and types ‘Comoy’s Pipes’ into google. 

He does some light reading about the history of pipes, reads a ‘pipe smoking for beginners’ wiki (briefly considering how lonely these people must be and wondering whether he’d found a new target market), has a good chuckle over the line: “Some additives have negative effects on the smoking qualities, causing tongue bite”, then finds a tobacconist just up the river in Covent Garden. 

He gives the pipe a hearty bite, marking it, then places it back in the box, left open on Elias’s desk. 

-

Peter takes the bankside walk, eager to avoid the oncoming rush hour traffic. It is, blessedly, raining; dramatically reducing the amount of post-work runners and amblers. He is just passing the Tate when he has a thought. 

It’s a rather amusing thought, one he’d rarely ever have, but the thought of Elias’s iterations coveting their smoking time has him wondering what pre-Jonah Elias’s choice of tobacco had been. Elias had become _Elias_ in ‘96, and Peter had never really cared about what kind of man the body had been before he’d been taken over, so he’d never ‘looked him up’. He had assumed _Elias_ would have deleted most records of Elias, but on thinking about it now, it would make more sense to keep some internet history alive, some record to show that Elias was a human with a life that did not suddenly begin in the mid-90s.

Predictably, the first few links that show up for ‘Elias Bouchard’ are his profile on the Magnus Institute’s website, his LinkedIn profile and various news articles either mentioning the archives or some academic publication quoting an archive conference Elias had spoken at. 

Peter ducked into an alcove so he could scroll, clicking through to page 10 of google before giving up that line of enquiry. He went back to LinkedIn, went through the man’s cv, checked websites for photos of staff, came up empty. Just before closing the tab and giving the endeavour up completely, Peter checked what university ‘Elias’ had been to. Looked up the alumni facebook page, checked through some photo albums, landed on one from “class of ‘92”. It’s a very awkward photo filled with incredibly pink faces and soft perms and there he is, Peter’s favourite white boy: back centre, skin so rosy-fresh to be sickening, expression so lit up with youthful pride and joy Peter almost wants to crush the phone in his hand. 

There are a couple of comments from old classmates, most along the “to be so young and innocent!” track, and Peter clicks on all their names, unsurprised to find their profiles absolutely free of any form of privacy. None of them have albums though, and he is loathe to scroll through decades worth of some-woman’s-children on the off-chance he’ll find blackmail material, so he doesn’t waste much time on any but one. 

One guy, amusingly also called ‘Peter’ has commented “ELIAS WITHOUT HIS VAPE! A VERY RARE PHOTO INDEED!” 

Peter can _feel_ the malicious intent rising off of himself, can almost see clouds of black in his aura, a smile threatening to crack through his resting ‘fuck off’ face.

He spends a solid few minutes with his phone up to his face, scrolling through other-Peter’s photos, until he finds a goldmine. An album of scanned photos from the man’s uni days, and… there, in glorious 6x4 is Elias-not- _Elias_ , lounging on some teenager’s dorm bed. He’s got a glaringly pink windbreaker on over what looks to be a holographic crop top, and he’s releasing a sweet ball of cotton with a cheeky wink.

Peter is vibrating with the discovery. He saves it to his phone with a giddiness he’s not felt in decades, his grin so wide it almost hurts. _Oh this is delicious. Elias is going to_ **_kill_ ** _him._

He walks the rest of the way to Covent Garden with a spring in his step. 

-

Elias is sat at his desk, eyes scanning over a document when Peter returns. Elias does not look up, does not shift in his seat, does not acknowledge Peter’s presence. 

The pipe remains in its box on Elias’s desk, moved just slightly out of the way, but on show. 

Peter places the carefully-wrapped package on Elias’s desk and begins to unwrap it, delighting that he can smell the tobacco rise from the paper as he peels back the layers. 

“Would you mind breaking out the ashtray, dear?”

“It is illegal to smoke indoors, Lukas.”

“Woe is me, to have married such a wet blanket.”

“Several times, in fact.” Elias clicks his tongue but opens a side-drawer anyway, pulling out the ceramic ashtray Peter knows so well. In golden writing across the bottom it reads ‘Keep Me Nice and Clean EYE Won’t Tell What I Have Seen’, a red sketch of an eye gracing the sentence with its pun. 

“Would you like to do the honours?” Peter asks, pushing the box of tobacco towards Elias, who ignores both man and gift. Peter hadn’t expected much audience interaction anyway, so he picks out his tools and begins work packing the pipe. It’s slower work than he’d anticipated, layering the tobacco, and he delights in working slower once he notices Elias’s hands flexing; such an obvious tell of the man’s frustrated impatience. “If you’d rather take over, my dear?” Peter asks, and Elias’s jaw only clenches harder. 

Once he’s tamped the tobacco until it bounces just right, he takes a dry huff and feels for the signature pull his wiki friend has taught him. “Match, dear?”

Elias tuts again and pulls a matchbook from a drawer, the outer cardboard flap advertising for some hotel in Germany. Half of the matches have been torn away from the book, and Peter relishes the thought of Jonah, in a cab, lighting his Comoy on the way back from an Opera. 

He lights the pipe twice to char it, takes a half-dozen puffs, then allows himself to relax with the seventh. God, after all that hard work, it was quite thrilling to get the hit of it, to savour the flavour of the tobacco, to let the heat work across his throat.

“Hm,” Peter says, before passing the pipe over to Elias.

“I’ve quit.”

“Quit, darling? You?”

“I’ve had quite enough attempts at arson. I find the smell displeases me.”

“Oh don’t be like that, Bouchard. After all the hard work I went through to get the thing lit.”

“My clothes will reek of _pub_ , Lukas.”

“And the kind tobacconist insisted that this was the best tobacco on the market.”

“If you will kindly refer to the Institute's anti-bullying policy, you will find peer pressure and drug abuse in tandem.”

“Come, Elias.”

“Leave off it, Peter.”

Peter bites down on the pipe again to prevent himself from smiling too hard. “Light of my life, sea to my shanty, tug of my boat, wouldn't you love to share my pipe with me?”

“I will stab you with this pen, Peter.”

“But Elias,” Peter says, voice dripping with false care, “I've seen so many portraits of Jonah Magnus with a pipe. Surely you miss the taste.”

“Surely you miss being out on your lovely boat, Peter. Perhaps one of your shipmates would prefer your tobacco.”

Peter takes a deep inhale through the pipe, keeps it rolling in him for a good, long moment before letting it puff out across the desk. Elias waves a hand over his face, clearing some of the smoke with a look of blank hatred. 

“If you’re sure I can’t convince you, darling.”

The corner of Elias’s lip curls in a facsimile of nicety. “Absolutely certain.”

“I suppose you won’t mind if I take the pipe with me on my next adventure?”

“Not at all, darling. I hope you get some pleasure from it.” Elias’s eyes have already dropped back down to the document he’d been reading, and Peter takes a second to relish the moment. He takes another half-puff of tobacco before disappearing, taking his pipe and accoutrements with him. 

-

Peter thinks that the furthest one can probably get from buying premium grade tobacco from a tobacconist in Covent Garden is to buy a bottle of vape liquid from the Poundland on the highstreet. 

He buys a variety of flavours, a veritable buffet of rainbow-coloured fluid, then walks across the street to buy a rig; an expensive one, sleek, one he’d like to see in Elias’s fingers. 

He sits alone in his parlour and he methodically vapes each liquid, wiping out the chamber, changing the filters so that he doesn’t cross-contaminate the senses. 

He takes deep, cloying lungfuls of disgusting flavour after disgusting flavour, working through mint (reminds him too much of Gertrude’s menthols), vanilla cream (sickening), mixed berry (sickening), caramel tobacco (sickening and an affront to the tobacco sat in its packaging next to him). Banoffee nearly makes Peter vomit, and he has to sideline back to mint to get the taste of it out of his mouth. 

He takes a break for a couple of hours that eventually turns into a couple of days, then a month when he decides it’s probably time to go visit somewhere maybe nobody can ever get to, to a place that doesn’t have the smell of fake banana permeating it. He takes a smaller ship, makes sure absolutely none of the crew have vaped a day in their life before, and only comes back once he’s completely forgotten the sickly film the bastard flavour had left on his tongue. 

Peter is grateful to find that, unlike tobacco, the vape liquid has not left a smell in his sofa. The sight of the vape pen on his side-table threatens to make his stomach flip… but the photo he’s printed out sitting under it steels him. 

God, it’s such a good photo. He picks it up, luxuriating in the young Elias’s open mouth, lips shined with what Peter imagines is lip balm, one pale arm forming a cushion behind his head. 

For a moment Peter can almost smell the photo: teenage stink and sweet vapour, an out-of-photo joint and the remnants of a pizza feast.

He goes to his bottles of fluid and cracks one open at random, more by colour than by looking at any label. He pours the liquid into his pen, stuffs the thing into his coat pocket with his photograph, and disappears.

-

Peter stands outside of the Institute and vapes. He’d rather do it inside, but he doesn’t want an audience, and he attracts far less attention standing a couple meters down the road. 

He vapes for nearly an hour, letting himself get consumed with it, the alleyway he’s in starting to resemble the mist of the lonely. He wants it everywhere, he wants this flavour to mark him. He wants to smell wholly, obnoxiously, sickeningly of his chosen scent.

-

Elias had been alerted to Peter’s return to land several hours ago, had noted the man’s proximity to the archives, but had not deigned to _look_ . Not yet. Peter had not yet stepped foot on Institute property, and Elias liked their games as much as Peter did. Elias liked to cut his time _watching_ until the last moment, delighted in the near-miss of being nearly caught out. 

He’d been rather surprised to find Peter had unlocked the final drawer in so quick a time, had wanted to keep that final prize for at least another decade, but he supposed if this was all Peter was going to do with it: to scratch the pipe, to blow smoke in Elias’s face, he was rather glad to get the disappointment out of the way. 

He supposed he wasn’t entirely sure what he did want from his husband. Destruction… carnal pleasure… arson…? To feel the heated pipe against his skin? To throw the bastard thing into the deepest ocean? 

He clicked his tongue. It was frustrating when he did not _know_. Perhaps that was why he’d kept it locked in the last hidey-hole of Jonah Magnus’s desk. It was an unsurety, and that more than anything made Elias seethe. 

He felt Peter enter and so made him feel better by _watching_ . There was little to see, Peter had disappeared from the plane and would reappear nearby, but Elias felt better _knowing_ anyway. He put down his pen, closed his eyes and sat back in his chair, anticipating. 

A puff of rich, woody tobacco, close-by, warm, the smoke shotgunned at him. Elias played along, took a deep breath of it, allowed himself to picture the pipe, the mouth it had come from. 

Then, lips on his. A tongue, tasting of foul and bitter smoke and — Elias took a fistful of Peter’s hair, pulling him closer. The taste of tobacco had almost disappeared, now, replaced by the taste of— the taste Elias could never quite forget — the taste of bubblegum, its liquid a neon pink, and it suffused Peter, Elias could smell it now, could sense it from every part of the man. 

Peter was grinning, Elias could feel it against his mouth, against his neck. “What’s wrong, mister Bouchard?” Peter said, mouthing at his collar, leaving wet kisses against Elias’s adam’s apple. Elias took a breath of Peter’s hair, kept Peter where he was, fingernails digging into Peter’s scalp. “Are you quite alright?”

“Mouth shut, Lukas.”

“But then how will I kiss you, mister Bouchard? How will you lick the taste off of me?”

“Quiet.”

“But if I’m quiet, you’ll never know about the photo I found-” 

Elias keeps Peter at arm’s length as he _knows,_ half-watches Peter’s pure delight as Elias fishes the photograph from man’s inner pocket. There is a not-so-brief moment where Elias considers whether he will be using the fountain pen a foot to his left to drain Peter’s jugular, or whether he will use the man’s handkerchief as a garrote. 

It’s Elias. Pre- _Elias_ Elias. Dressed up in his Sunday best, lavishing himself in extravagance. It makes Jonah— it makes _Elias_ furious. This _boy_ . This _child_ . This… _dog._ Because of this Elias, Jonah— _Elias_ can no longer savour his once favoured passtime. Because of Elias, _Elias_ craves… craves not the sophisticated bite of tobacco through a pipe made by a true master, wooden bowl carved from wood hundreds of years old, treated and polished to perfection, bone stem designed by someone who truly has passion for his craft, but for _bubblegum-flavoured liquid._ To… to _vape_ from a trinket made for teenage hoodlums. 

It has been almost a quarter of a century since taking this new body, and still the taste of real tobacco, of the pipe, of cigars, even of cheap cigarettes smoked through filters and flavoured with preservatives, none of them satisfied him. 

Him, Jonah Magnus. _Elias Bouchard_. 

And now, here Peter was, and Elias could not get enough of him. Chased the flavour across Peter’s skin, allowed himself to imagine the cloud of it entering his lungs, felt the curious rush of it in his lungs, that hit of nicotine he still had no alternative to… 

“I despise you,” Elias says as Peter nudges him over and kneels between his legs.

“Would you like a divorce, my dearest?”

Elias makes a low, angry sound. It is hardly a sophisticated trap, but it is a trap all the same. He glances at his most prized possessions: his mounted divorce papers. Every one initiated by himself, Peter’s fault emblazoned in glorious detail. The mermaid pipe, of course, the ashtray, the time Peter had arrived home in full Captain’s regalia but emblazoned with ‘tropical pattern’ like some cruise parody of a respectable man… 

Elias Bouchard will not allow the words ‘bubblegum flavoured vape’ taint his collection. He would, quite frankly, ratherrcause the end of the world and kill himself in the process than to have that indignity put upon him. 

And Peter, the absolute bastard, knows this. 

He bites Peter, hard, through the material of his shoulder, biting hard enough he hopes to draw blood, and Peter laughs, absolutely overjoyed. 

“Oh Elias,” Peter says, whispering his intoxicatingly sweetened words into Elias’s ear, breath ghosting pleasure through Elias, “I believe that’s checkmate.”

**Author's Note:**

> Me, thinking about how vapes were only introduced to the market in 2003: IT’S FICTION BAYYYBEE! 
> 
> alt. title: Elias Bouchard's bubblegum vape


End file.
